Because I can’t seem to get enough of the guy, I want to talk more about Sam Harris’s point of view. He believes that human morality is universal — even if we subtract God from the equation. He thinks there are objective rights and wrongs and takes offense at the “politically correct” point of view that all cultures and all societies are on equal footing in terms of what is right and what is not. Harris argues these points very eloquently, and I don’t want to try to speak for him when he can do it so much better himself. Read his books if you want his opinion. I’ll give you mine here.
In the novel Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, one of the Karamazov brothers says, “Without God, anything is permitted.” Like the character in the novel, many people believe that morality comes from God and that people will only behave nicely to each other if they think God is watching. I spoke a little about this in chapter 1 when I wrote about Lance Wolf being beaten to death in Jerusalem. Buddhism doesn’t frame its moral stance in terms of what will or will not get you punished by God. But it contains the belief that there is right action, and that right action is not simply a subjective thing that anyone can decide for him- or herself. One of the most important Buddhist poems, called “Sandokai,” or “The Harmony of Difference and Equality,” says, “Don’t set up standards of your own.” This poem is so important that in some Zen temples the monks chant it weekly to remind themselves of its message.
Yet even though the Buddhist concept of morality is that moral action is objective, it is not that moral action is always exactly the same in the superficial sense. Harris puts this in interesting terms. He says that there is a “moral landscape” with peaks and valleys, and that even though each peak does not look exactly like every other peak, we can still recognize the high points as high and the low points as low.
We desperately need to come to terms with what is and what is not moral behavior in a sense that is devoid of sectarianism. But what about when people who have to live together disagree about what is and is not moral?
When I was in Jerusalem I saw some Orthodox Jewish women wearing head coverings, as well as a number of Muslim women wearing hijab. The word hijab can refer to a wide variety of things. In one sense it simply means “modest dress.” In common usage, though, it generally refers to head scarves worn by women to show their modesty. Sometimes hijab is taken to further extremes in the form of full-body coverings known as burkas.
I only saw three women wearing burkas during the week I spent in Jerusalem. Most of the Palestinian women I saw there didn’t dress much more modestly than most Jewish women I saw. Few wore any kind of head covering at all. What was weird to me was that I had a funny reaction every time I saw a woman in Jerusalem dressed in a short skirt or hot pants or anything like that. There were almost as few women dressed that way as dressed in burkas. Whenever I saw one I was a little taken aback.
Now, normally I am not at all shocked by the sight of immodestly dressed women. In fact, quite the opposite. I spent ten years in Tokyo, where some women seem to take pride in pushing the limits of what is considered acceptable dress. Some women there appeared to be challenging the very laws of physics. This never bothered me at all. In fact, I enjoyed it.
But that was Tokyo. In Jerusalem such dress just did not seem appropriate. In fact, it seemed to represent a challenge to the culture, a kind of slap in the face to Orthodox Jews and observant Muslims alike. Maybe it was.
In Israel there are laws protecting a person’s right to dress the way she wants to, within certain very broad limits. The most powerful people in that society believe that the way a person dresses is not a significant moral issue. On the other hand, murder, as in the case of Lance Wolf, is considered a significant issue. Even if some parts of Israeli society see immodest dress as offensive to God, the people in power do not. Or if they do, they don’t believe it should be a legal matter. In terms of the moral landscape, murder would be a big valley, while immodest dress would be a pothole at most.
I am not averse to dressing in ways that challenge the norms of society. I was part of the punk rock movement, after all. We were all about challenging the prevailing norms of society. And some of us — not me — were not afraid to fight, quite literally, for our right to dress how we wanted. So I have a lot of sympathy for women in Jerusalem who want to shake up the Orthodox folks. I think they ought to be shaken up.
But sometimes I don’t feel as punk rock as I used to. I don’t think the way a person dresses is a moral issue. But some folks do. And in every society there are certain accepted norms. Sometimes those norms are dead wrong. Yet the society has agreed to them, or been forced to agree to them. I am not at all in favor of blind conformity. But sometimes conformity with eyes wide open can get you farther than flouting society’s mistaken ideas will. It’s always a tough call to make. When I was young, flouting the norms and freaking out the people who clung to them seemed like a good idea. Now I tend to dress and act a bit more conservatively in order to draw those people in before I hit ’em up with the hard stuff.
The question, though, is whether or not there is some underlying moral structure to human relations. Often atheists like to point out the fallacy of believing that God creates all good. If God is the source of all good, then whatever he says is good must be good. If God were to say that torture and murder were good, then they would be. But most of us don’t believe that. And if you don’t believe God can make something good by simply deciding to make it good, then you have to say that morality is above God.
Of course, plenty of people really do believe that God can decide that bad things are good. This is why they can blow up office buildings or buses in the name of God. Most of us, though, think those people are crazy. I certainly do.
I don’t think that God is either able to bend morality according to his will or somehow subservient to a morality that is above him. I think the universal morality that Harris postulates is an example of God. God is neither above nor below morality. There is no difference between morality and God.
Nishijima Roshi often uses the phrase “Rule of the Universe” to describe his ideas about universal morality. He believes that the universe has rules. Some of these we already know about, like gravity and the conservation of energy and so on. Nishijima believes that these rules extend into the area of moral action. In fact, it’s fair to say that Buddhism in general sees the laws of right moral action as inherent in the structure of the universe itself.
If you take a mechanistic view of things, that idea sounds absurd. The mechanistic view has it that what we do is pretty much arbitrary. We are bound by the laws of physics. But we are not bound by any laws of morality. That’s pretty plain to see if you just look at the headlines in any newspaper anywhere in the world any day of the week.
But Buddhism doesn’t see reality as mechanistic. Our subjective experience of the world is as real a thing as concrete matter. We are free to behave immorally, but there are always consequences to such action. We can deny those consequences and pretend they don’t exist, but that won’t change a thing.
Stephen Batchelor rejects the Buddhist notion of karma, at least as it’s understood by many today. The typical understanding of karma is that the universe keeps tabs on the good and evil that we do and metes out rewards and punishments accordingly. If there’s a God or a universe that rewards good and punishes evil, then we have to deal with what philosophers call the “problem of evil.”
In one of the oldest records of his sayings, Buddha brings up what we today would call the problem of evil as an argument against the existence of God. He says, “There are recluses who maintain and believe that whatever a man experiences, be it pleasant, unpleasant or neutral — all that is caused by God’s act of creation. If that is so then people commit murder, theft and unchaste deeds due to God’s act of creation, they indulge in lying, slanderous and harsh talk due to God’s act of creation, they are covetous, hateful and hold wrong views due to God’s act of creation.”*
In The Jataka Tales, the stories of Buddha’s supposed previous existences, the problem of evil comes up again. Buddha says there, “If Brahma is the lord and creator of the whole world why has he not made the entire world happy without ordaining misfortune in the world? Why has he made the world full of injustice, deceit, falsehood and conceit? The lord of beings, then, is evil, since he has ordained unrighteousness when there could have been righteousness.”†
Buddhists by and large do not believe in a God who watches over us, rewarding our virtuous deeds and punishing our sinful ones. However, we do talk about karma, an idea that is widely misunderstood in the West. Some who hear about karma equate it with a watchful God doling out rewards and punishments, only without invoking the idea of God. But it’s not the same thing at all. Some say that we must believe in God or at least in karma, or society will fall apart.
For example, the guys who killed Lance Wolf were at least nominally Muslim. But they did not have a real belief in God. Because if they believed that Allah saw all their actions, they would have feared reprisals for beating up a scrawny guy in a back alley.
Fear of God is supposed to be more potent than fear of the law. If you beat up a scrawny guy in a back alley in the middle of the night the law might not catch you. But God is the ultimate security camera. He sees everything. So God will definitely catch you and punish you, and that punishment will be more severe than anything the law can come up with.
One important societal function of faith in God, then, is to keep order. I’ve long felt that phrases like “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10) were meant to convey this sense of God. The fear that you will be punished by God for acting immorally is the beginning of the wisdom of learning to act morally.
Of course, this function of God doesn’t always work out the way it should, even when people have faith. It’s easy enough for a religious leader to convince people that in certain cases God wants them to do some maiming and killing. Still, even in these cases, God is seen as protecting good people from evil.
An unspoken idea has been circulating for thousands of years that if you don’t believe in God you’re a danger to society. There was probably a time in many emerging civilizations when anyone who didn’t believe in the prevailing religion actually was dangerous to society. To say you didn’t believe in God in those days was like saying today that you don’t believe in the laws of your nation. Protecting religion and forcing it on those who may not have wanted it was a way of ensuring that society could continue to exist and function, the same way we contemporary people force anyone who might not care for speed limits to follow them anyway.
Forcing unbelievers to submit to the prevailing belief in God was a way of preserving social order. The view that preserving religious belief is the way to preserve social order has been passed down without most of us realizing its original function. This, I believe, can account for some of the almost maniacal urgency that many “true believers” have toward converting everyone to their way of thinking, even if the believers themselves don’t understand why they do it.
The concept of karma can function in much the same way. But it’s subtler and more rational than that. The word karma means “action.” We know that all action in the physical world has some kind of effect. The study of cause-and-effect relationships in the physical world is the foundation of science. In a sense we could say that science is the study of certain aspects of the law of karma.
Buddhism extends the observable physical laws of cause and effect into the nonphysical realm. This makes sense based on the Buddhist proposition that form is emptiness and emptiness is form or, in other words, that matter is the immaterial and the immaterial is matter. Cause and effect is then not limited to physical reactions occurring within material substances.
I realize it’s tough to believe this. We always see what appears to be immoral behavior being materially rewarded, while moral behavior goes unrewarded or is even punished. Good people die of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Bad people get rich and live in mansions in the Hollywood Hills.
In the Shobogenzo chapter called “Karma in the Three Times,” Dogen says,
Retribution for good and bad has three times. Generally, people only see that to the good [comes] early death; to the violent, long life; to the evil, fortune; and to the righteous, calamity; whereupon [people] say that there is no cause and effect and no wrongness or happiness. Particularly, they do not know that shadow and sound accord with [their sources], not differing by a thousandth or a hundredth and — even with the passing of a hundred thousand myriad kalpas [a kalpa is 4.32 billion years] — never wearing away.
But most of us won’t be convinced by this argument, since it seems to require a belief in reincarnation. To be satisfied by this line of reasoning, you have to believe that evildoers who make a fortune in this life get reincarnated as worms or slugs or something as retribution. If you believe that, fine. But most of us don’t. I don’t. And yet I still feel that what Dogen says here makes sense and fits my real experience.
What convinced me about the law of karma was being able to see it at work in my own life. It took about ten years of daily zazen practice before I just started to barely perceive it.
This is because sometimes cause-and-effect links are not readily apparent, especially if you’ve got a vested interest in seeing things the wrong way. One of the most popular YouTube videos is an ad from the 1950s for Camel cigarettes that begins with a narrator asking, “What brand of cigarette do you smoke, doctor?” The aim of these ads was to fend off claims that cigarettes were bad for your health. It’s hard for us now to believe it, but at the time there was some doubt as to whether smoking cigarettes was linked to lung cancer. This real doubt was coupled with a desire to continue earning the money from cigarette sales and endorsements. After a while, though, new research erased those doubts. Now very few of us question the link between smoking and cancer. Once we learn how to see cause-and-effect relationships even when we don’t want to, they become so obvious we wonder how we could have missed them.
Sometimes when people hear that I believe in karma they get very upset. They start bringing up things like innocent Iraqi babies being blown up by American smart bombs or nice people like my mom getting terrible diseases. They accuse me of saying that these people somehow deserved their suffering. They say that karma is a philosophical justification for blaming the victim.
But I never think about karma in terms of other people’s lives, only in terms of my own. I don’t look at a homeless person and go, “That guy musta done something really awful!” Nor do I think, “Jeez, that guy Lance certainly did bad stuff in his past lives to have ended up getting beaten to death on the streets of Jerusalem.” It’s not my business to make that kind of judgment. It couldn’t possibly help anything, anyway, even if I made such a judgment and even if it turned out I was correct. If I do happen to catch myself entertaining such useless thoughts, I ignore them.
But also when I see a supposedly “evil” person being rewarded by society, I have to wonder if the happiness he projects is real or if the evil I believe him to have done is truly evil. Since I can’t answer either of these questions, I have to also consign such judgments to the heap of silly and useless thoughts, just like thoughts about blameless people who end up victims of bad fortune. Besides, what seems to be bad fortune often is not and what looks like good fortune often turns out to have negative effects.
However, I am able to continuously watch the careless actions that I take meet with bad effects and the nice things I do meet with good results. It happens all the time — so often that I would feel foolish denying it. So I accept it. And I try to be careful. When I slip up — which is all the time — the universe puts me in my place.
If you haven’t been able to watch this for yourself it probably just seems like a groundless belief or wishful thinking. It might look like the delusion some psychologists call the “just world hypothesis.” Wikipedia defines this as “the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just so when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but often at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault.”
Blaming the victims is not what Buddhism is about. Even if I believe that cause and effect operates in all situations, in the real world real things actually happen to real people. A Buddhist’s responsibility is to help, not to judge or place blame. In the moment things are happening, who is to blame matters very little, anyway.
Nor must you blame yourself when a seemingly unaccountable evil befalls you. You don’t really know what’s good for you and what’s not. After I graduated from college I applied for loads of jobs in Akron, Ohio, where I lived. I got turned down for every one. At the time I moaned bitterly about the unfairness of my fate. But it was getting turned down for those jobs that led me to take the desperate action of moving to Japan. My life improved dramatically because of what I had thought to be dire circumstances. Happens all the time.
To acknowledge the role of cause and effect is not to blame anyone for anything. It would be just as ridiculous to blame a match for catching fire when struck. Our definitions of what is good fortune and what is bad fortune are mostly worthless.
As far as whether or not our good and bad deeds meet with good and bad ends, I think a lot of people today see it as a choice of three options: 1) You believe that the universe is dead matter, morality is arbitrary, and life is an accident. 2) You believe that God exists, rewards good and punishes evil, performs miracles, and is the property of one specific religion. 3) You simply do not know.
I know that many nuanced arguments lie in between these choices. But it seems that most of us think those are our only options. I know I did for a long time. And yet I now think it’s not that we must choose between faith and reason, but that there’s a kind of faith that can be reasonable as well, as we’ve talked about.
Yet the unreasonable idea of God as miracle worker persists. Let’s look at that next.
*From Early Buddhism and the Bhagavad Gita by Motilal Banarsidass.
†From Early Buddhism.